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Gun crime has plunged, but Americans think it's up, says study

Does this decline in gun-related crimes weaken the case for more gun control?

Gun crime has plunged, but Americans think it's up, says study

A placard featuring children victims of gun violence is displayed during a demonstration in front of the White House on Monday. A new study shows that violent crime has dropped, though many Americans are not aware of the decline. (Jewel Samad / AFP-Getty Images / May 6, 2013)

Gun crime has plunged in the United States since its peak in the middle of the 1990s, including gun killings, assaults, robberies and other crimes, two new studies of government data show.

Yet few Americans are aware of the dramatic drop, and more than half believe gun crime has risen, according to a newly released survey by the Pew Research Center.

In less than two decades, the gun murder rate has been nearly cut in half. Other gun crimes fell even more sharply, paralleling a broader drop in violent crimes committed with or without guns. Violent crime dropped steeply during the 1990s and has fallen less dramatically since the turn of the millennium.

The number of gun killings dropped 39% between 1993 and 2011, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported in a separate report released Tuesday. Gun crimes that weren’t fatal fell by 69%. However, guns still remain the most common murder weapon in the United States, the report noted. Between 1993 and 2011, more than two out of three murders in the U.S. were carried out with guns, the Bureau of Justice Statistics found.

The bureau also looked into non-fatal violent crimes. Few victims of such crimes -- less than 1% -- reported using a firearm to defend themselves.

Despite the remarkable drop in gun crime, only 12% of Americans surveyed said gun crime had declined compared with two decades ago, according to Pew, which surveyed more than 900 adults this spring. Twenty-six percent said it had stayed the same, and 56% thought it had increased.

It’s unclear whether media coverage is driving the misconception that such violence is up. The mass shootings in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo., were among the news stories most closely watched by Americans last year, Pew found. Crime has also been a growing focus for national newscasts and morning network shows in the past five years but has become less common on local television news.

“It’s hard to know what’s going on there,” said D’Vera Cohn, senior writer at the Pew Research Center. Women, people of color and the elderly were more likely to believe that gun crime was up than men, younger adults or white people. The center plans to examine crime issues more closely later this year.

Though violence has dropped, the United States still has a higher murder rate than most other developed countries, though not the highest in the world, the Pew study noted. A Swiss research group, the Small Arms Survey, says that the U.S. has more guns per capita than any other country.

Experts debate why overall crime has fallen, attributing the drop to all manner of causes, such as the withering of the crack cocaine market and surging incarceration rates.

Some researchers have even linked dropping crime to reduced lead in gasoline, pointing out that lead can cause increased aggression and impulsive behavior in exposed children.

The victims of gun killings are overwhelmingly male and disproportionately black, according to Bureau of Justice Statistics and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. Compared with other parts of the country, the South had the highest rates of gun violence, including both murders and other violent gun crimes.

A study released Tuesday by the government's Bureau of Justice Statistics found that gun-related homicides dropped from 18,253 in 1993 to 11,101 in 2011. That's a 39 percent reduction.

Another report by the private Pew Research Center found a similar decline by looking at the rate of gun homicides, which compares the number of killings to the size of the country's growing population. It found that the number of gun homicides per 100,000 people fell from 7 in 1993 to 3.6 in 2010, a drop of 49 percent.

Both reports also found that non-fatal crimes involving guns were down by roughly 70 percent over that period. The Justice report said the number of such crimes diminished from 1.5 million in 1993 to 467,300 in 2011.

That's great that is has dropped. I'm not surprised that the perception is that it has risen.

To me, this doesn't make a difference. Perhaps it's a positive and means that we are finally becoming more intolerant of gun violence.

And I think that the fact that gun crime victims are disproportionately black males probably has *something* to do with why a lot of people just don't give a crap about gun safety issues/legislation.

What a load of racist bullshit. I don't give a rats behind what the color of anyone's skin is. I don't give a crap about gun legislation because I happen to support the Constitution...which says this right SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED.

the same old crappy talking points made to make people feel guilty about supporting the right to bear arms.

Quoting yourspecialkid:

Quoting Seasidegirl:

That's great that is has dropped. I'm not surprised that the perception is that it has risen.

To me, this doesn't make a difference. Perhaps it's a positive and means that we are finally becoming more intolerant of gun violence.

And I think that the fact that gun crime victims are disproportionately black males probably has *something* to do with why a lot of people just don't give a crap about gun safety issues/legislation.

What a load of racist bullshit. I don't give a rats behind what the color of anyone's skin is. I don't give a crap about gun legislation because I happen to support the Constitution...which says this right SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED.

I think this is true of all crime, actually. People's perceptions are that we live in a less-safe world than when we were kids, but crime statistics don't support that. We are actually safer in general, in terms of crime.

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